Eileen Hershenov serves as Senior Counsel to PEN America. She handles various in-house legal matters, advises on PEN America’s litigation docket, and provides additional legal support for program teams.
Hershenov previously served PEN America as Interim Chief Operating Officer beginning in 2023, to help guide the organization through a period of significant internal growth and explosive external challenges to free expression, then served as Deputy CEO, Programs and Legal, and finally, until January 2026, as Chief Legal Officer. She has worked for decades, primarily as a general counsel both in the United States and abroad, at the intersection of human and civil rights, technology and law. Before coming to PEN America, she served for five years as a Senior Vice President at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), leading its democracy, tech policy and civil rights initiatives, and standing up a litigation program.
Prior to ADL, Hershenov served as General Counsel to several of the nation’s leading mission-driven not-for-profits, including the Open Society Foundations, Consumer Reports and the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. In addition to leading the legal work at each, she helped guide various policy initiatives. At OSF she was one of several executives who developed the initial agenda for the US Programs work, and was the founding General Counsel of the Central European University. She also led the legal work for the establishment of OSF’s offices around the world. At Consumer Reports, she founded the in-house legal department and grew the legal team, with a particular focus on media defense law, IP, employment, labor, privacy and security, board governance and transactional work. Hershenov also helped develop the Consumer Reports grassroots advocacy staff and strategy and pioneered initial plans for a privacy and tech focus in the testing departments. At Wikipedia she led the organization’s legal and policy teams, including efforts to defend against attacks that threatened Wikipedia’s independence, community editing model and ability to act as the world’s largest repository of free knowledge.
Earlier in her career, Hershenov worked as an organizer for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), as a clerk for federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York, as a Karpatkin Fellow at the ACLU, and a litigation associate at the firm of Morrison & Foerster. Hershenov holds a BA in Economics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.